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As an elementary school principal in Simcoe, Ont., Edmond Dixon saw countless underachieving young boys pass by his desk. “He’s incapable of paying attention long enough to write a paragraph,” he would hear over and over from discouraged teachers lining up yet another male student outside the principal’s office. After school, Dixon would watch defeated as the same unfocused boys would spend hours mastering their skateboard or perfecting their slapshot on the playground.

“I was frustrated that we had so many boys that I felt weren’t achieving. I didn’t feel like I had the tools at that point to help them.”

Dixon left his principalship to get his doctoral degree at the University of Toronto. There, he researched what happens in the brain when people are motivated. He has written a new book based on his research called Helping Boys Learn: 6 Secrets for Your Son’s Success in School. Often boys do not succeed in the classroom because they don’t sit still and stay on task, won’t listen to their teachers and spend more time playing video games than doing their homework.

Dixon outlines six strategies to help parents engage boys in their education, which he developed by working with more than 50,000 students around Toronto. The first three strategies — movement, games and humour — are meant to hook boys from the time they start talking. Teach boys to spell while tossing a ball or let them act out the process of evaporation, said Dixon. The next day, they’ll come back asking to play “that game” again, without realizing they’re learning, too.

“We want boys to become as enthusiastic and passionate about learning in the classroom as they are about their video games and the sports they play,” said Dixon.

Having implemented the three initial principles, Dixon said parents can move on to the fourth and fifth stages, mastery and challenge. In these stages, Dixon said parents have to entice boys into becoming great at something by leveraging their passions and enthusiasm.

“What we find is if you provide him with a pathway and show him the rewards of becoming really good at something in school, then he will take that up on his own.”

By encouraging boys to take the initiative to invest in something at school, parents can use their son’s success to impart the most important strategy, meaning.

“To foster meaning, you show him how important it is, all the learning he’s doing. Allow him to teach it to someone else, to show that it’s important and benefits someone else.”

The book will be released in paperback Aug. 26, just before students head back to school. September is a trying time for some families with sons, Dixon said.

“A lot of parents are concerned as we come back to school. For certain parents and certain boys, this is not a happy time at all because they haven’t had a lot of success. My fear for some of these boys is that they get so turned off that when they finally decide they want to do something, they haven’t got the prerequisite skills.”

The disruptions boys cause in the classroom affect all students, he said.

“Statistically, teachers spend about a third of their classroom time redirecting and disciplining. The vast majority of that time is spent on boys. That’s attention that girls aren’t getting because they’re spending it on boys. These things are often evidence of how their brain is functioning.”

When boys are young, their brains have a greater capacity to perceive and use movement, but are less capable than girls at mastering oral language skills. By the age of six or seven, boys start getting testosterone jolts and become more competitive. When they fail, say by getting a bad mark on a test or getting scolded by a teacher, boy’s testosterone levels drop. Repeated failures, said Dixon, cause boys to lose interest in school because the loss of testosterone leaves them self-conscious.

Perceived failures early in life can have serious consequences, he said. School-aged boys are diagnosed with ADHD twice as much as girls, and are three times as likely to be medicated. Boys are more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to complete college. In school, boys make up the vast majority of students who are placed in special-education classes, get sent to the office for discipline, are suspended or expelled and who underachieve in literacy and on standardized tests.

“The No. 1 response when boys are asked why they drop out is, ‘Nobody cared. Wouldn’t matter anyways. Made no difference.’ In other words, they weren’t saying it made no difference, they were saying ‘I made no difference.’ If you’re a parent, you look at your son, you never want them to feel that way.”

Dixon, who is a father of two sons in their 20s, said parents have much more power than they know to influence their son’s success in school.

“We need to show boys that learning is important because it helps you to become the person that you want to be.”

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